In Three New Novels, Summer Escapes Prove Illusory

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CreditCreditJohn Gall

By Mike Peed

July 28, 2017

WE SHALL NOT ALL SLEEPBy Estep Nagy 272 pp. Bloomsbury, $26.

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It’s July 1964 on Maine’s Seven Island, where the blue-blooded Quick and Hillsinger clans long ago replaced their ancestors’ logging camps with a pair of imposing summer homes. The families, based in New York and Washington, are rival power brokers, the type that, as Jim Hillsinger puts it, have “the quasi-magical ability to change perception and even reality. They could make careers, make money, change public opinion.” On the island, as the youngsters skylark in an unsupervised bunkhouse, their parents tipple and gossip in well-appointed, well-staffed drawing rooms. “All anyone needs in order to be made whole is one night under these roofs, in these beds, and in front of these fires,” Jim’s wife, Lila, declares.

In reality, Seven Island serves less as an antidote for urban drudgery than as a theater for psychological warfare. The Cold War is throwing its heat. Jim has recently been dismissed from the C.I.A. on suspicion of treason, and Lila appears to have had an affair with his nemesis, Billy Quick, whose dead wife (who happened to be Lila’s sister) had dabbled in Communism. To reclaim both his career and his marriage, Jim must spy on his own life.

Nagy’s novel roguishly equates international brinkmanship with interpersonal relations, an analogy that underscores the ways in which both can abjure immutable truths. One’s survival, Jim and his adversaries cynically assert, depends on fashioning a framework as believable as it is self-serving. In their view, human existence is a black operation.

Nagy is acutely attuned to the conventions of the well-heeled: the monogrammed silver trays, the social hypoxia that lies north of 96th Street in Manhattan, the fact that it’s “only the unknown drunks that anyone objects to.” But he untangles his narrative largely in bursts of italicized flashback, a technique thin on intrigue and thick on intelligence-report exposition. Hastily drawn characters — grandchildren, house guests, island staff — cruise past like lobster boats, and resolutions arise as mechanically as the traps are pulled up.

Nagy’s most gripping subplot involves Jim’s decision to exile his young son to an undeveloped island in a kind of muscular christening. What lesson are he and the others teaching their heirs? “Victory,” Jim’s father grunts. Power doesn’t preserve itself.

Set on an island in New York during the summer of 1992 — when “that liberal governor from Arkansas” is “slithering his way toward the White House” — Fierro’s all-but-the-kitchen-sink novel incorporates essentially everything that’s topical in 2017: race and gender relations; income inequality and class dynamics; climate change and environmental devastation; sexual awakening and bullying; mental illness and dementia; teenage sex; domestic violence; infertility; cancer. “We are in a war, son,” a doddering island nabob insists. “The crusade to make America great again.”

Such a hefty assemblage of themes is spawned by a complicated plot: Avalon houses a defense contractor, Grudder Aviation, which may be leaching toxins into the community’s groundwater. Leslie Marshall, a former hippie and prodigal town belle, has returned home with Jules, her African-American husband, and a local teenager named Maddie defies her reactionary and abusive father by pursuing Jules and Leslie’s son. Maddie’s little brother is discovering he’s gay, and her grandmother has come back from retirement in Florida, intending to kill herself. The E.P.A. is investigating Grudder, which might have to merge with a rival. The island’s sea wall is crumbling. Eastside Avalonians (the rich) are sparring with Westsiders (the poor). Rising above this maelstrom are hordes of gypsy moth caterpillars, whose literal and symbolic drone is the song of the summer.

Aiming to suppress their woes, Fierro’s libertine characters imbibe and inhale all manner of drink and drugs, but they rarely breathe. Their various pathologies are less embodied than performed, and although Fierro hurls plenty of 1990s cultural particulars (Cool Ranch Doritos, Piercing Pagoda, “Cowabunga!”) at the page like splatter paint, this verisimilitude never hardens into authenticity.

Still, the novel’s late depictions of Maddie’s anxious relationship with her family hit hard, giving the narrative a savage momentum. A final crescendo of violence appears to bring some peace, although, like Avalon’s gypsy moths, the menace may merely be starting its cycle anew. “Let them believe for now,” we are told. “Let them play.”

Monninger, a professor of English at Plymouth State University, seems to writebooks — romancenovels, young-adultfiction, memoirs — as routinely as his students post to Facebook. The protagonist of his latest work, 22-year-old, newly graduated Heather Mulgrew, is, of course, digitally enlightened. In the summer that follows her commencement, as she and two besties hostel-hop across Europe, they text, FaceTime and post to Instagram. But then Heather meets Jack Quiller-Couch, who’s soulfully retracing his grandfather’s journey home after World War II. A Vermont farm boy, Jack espouses an unplugged, anti-millennial credo. “I hate taking photos of everything,” he announces in a flirty confession. “It means what’s going on now is only this thing we perform so we can take pictures and look at them later.” His worldview titillates Heather even as it unmoors her: “Everything before it had been mere prelude; everything afterward would be Jack.”

Monninger’s story line, countering its antagonist’s zest for rebellion, observes the rules of romance fiction: Heather and Jack meet cute on a packed train; Jack woos Heather through adrenalized exploits (careering down the autobahn in a Mercedes convertible while he spoon-feeds her Ben & Jerry’s); Heather devotes herself to Jack despite her hunch that he harbors a game-changing secret. Yet Monninger’s affable prose offers distinct seductions (“the subway station smells like panting”) and the platitudinous love affair (“Jack took me to bed in the late afternoon and devoured me”) is spiced with sharp repartee and social criticism. “America never gets tired of bombs,” a wizened porter tells the couple. “Married people always know exactly what single people should do,” a friend carps. In fashioning a reductionist take on the coed brain, Monninger privileges the hyphen. Heather ponders “boy-tears,” “man-candy” and “the no-man zone.” Her first fight with Jack? Call it “who-exactly-is-this-person-and-why-out-of-all-the-people-in-the-world-am-I-spending-time-with-him-question-mark-question-mark-question-mark.”

“The Map That Leads to You” is a gossamer confection, spun sugar at the summer carnival. It’s also an inspiriting estival fling, one that, as Heather says of her relationship with Jack, melts any residual winter ice.

Mike Peed has written for The New Yorker, The Washington Post and other publications. He teaches English at Choate Rosemary Hall.